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Armed men kidnapped an American missionary from a school in Nigeria and have demanded the equivalent of almost $300,000 for her safe return, Nigerian police said Tuesday. The Rev. Phyllis Sortor, a missionary with the Free Methodist Church in Seattle, was identified by her church as the U.S. citizen abducted from the Hope Academy compound in Kogi state.

A group of five armed men, three of whom had masks over their faces, jumped the walls of the compound and fired shots into the air at 10:30 a.m. local time Monday (4:30 a.m. ET), Kogi Police Commissioner Adeyemi Ogunjemilusi said. Speaking to NBC News…

Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) militants have abducted at least 90 Christian men, women and children from a cluster of villages in northeastern Syria, according to reports received by human rights activists on Tuesday.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights reported that ISIS militants seized members of the Assyrian community, a Christian minority sect, during a series of dawn raids centering on the town of Tal Tamr and neighboring villages.

Another group, the Syriac National Council of Syria, said that it had verified at least 150 people missing who were kidnapped in the raids.

The abductions occurred as Kurdish Peshmerga forces, backed by U.S. airstrikes, have waged a campaign against ISIS strongholds in northern Syria, forcing ISIS militants back by at least 3 miles, according to Peshmerga commanders and activists on the ground.

The Egyptian government said Sunday that a video apparently showing the execution of Coptic Egyptian hostages in Libya by militants allied to the Islamic State of Iraq and Greater Syria (ISIS) was genuine, underscoring the group’s global reach and the unity of message among its adherents.

The five-minute clip, published online on Sunday, depicts the hostages — believed to be 21 Christian Coptic laborers from Egypt, kidnapped from the city of Sirt — being marched onto a beach where they are forced onto the sand and then killed by knife-wielding executioners.

One of the killers, dressed in camouflage, speaks in English. “We will conquer Rome,” he declares, pointing his knife toward the sea.

The video has similar qualities to the filmed executions of ISIS hostages in Iraq and Syria. The hostages wear the same orange jumpsuits as the Western hostages, intended as a reference to the uniforms worn by prisoners…